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Saturday, April 30, 2016

When I was researching on the IKEA kitchen buying process, I did not find much information on the interwebs. So I thought I'd write up a bit more on it. It's a bit longer and heavier than usual. But bear with me. I believe it'll be useful for the next person planning an IKEA kitchen purchase.

My kitchen planning process

I'm old school so I used pen and paper to plan before I laid my plans down on the software. IKEA even provided grid paper here.

Firstly, I familiarised myself with the height, widths and depths of the METOD cabinets. The basic frames are as follows:

There are also open cabinets, high cabinets, wall cabinets with drawers, fridge cabinets in different dimensions.

Then starting from one corner of the wall, I added the right combination of base cabinets according to the length of the wall and how I would use the cabinets. (Eg. a pull out cabinet for sauces and condiments to the left of my stove, drawers for cutlery in the kitchen island) Did the same for the wall cabinets. When I had a rough idea of how it should go I was ready to plan online.

How to use the IKEA Home Planner

You know, the IKEA Home Planner is delightful and at the same time, is responsible for my greatly reduced hair count. The learning curve was a little steep for me actually. It was laggy, it didn’t carry the full range and didn’t always do what I wanted it to. I would click to rotate a cabinet, cook dinner and come back to it and it’s still turning.

Then, I went to IKEA and watched the pros, the Kitchen Planners, use it and picked up a few tricks. After that, it played nice with me and it quickly became my favourite night time activity. Because what’s better than watching kitchen doors transform from BROKHULT to RINGHULT? Sigh ... I have no life.

If you’re using the IKEA Home Planner for the first time, you’ll need to create a profile so you can save your work. You’ll be asked to install a browser plug-in too. Once you've done that, the fun (and hair pulling) begins.

Here are 10 useful tips when using the IKEA Home Planner:

1. When creating your layout, use “3D Line View” (which is the ugly line drawing version) instead of “Front 3D View”. It loads much faster. Switch to “Front 3D View” only when you want to see how it looks in 3D.